Is It Worth Keeping Copper Pennies?

Finally took in the majority of my copper cents to the bank today for cash.
My stash was 84 pounds and consisted of 12,442 Memorial cents, and got me $124.42 in cash. I ended up taking $50 with me and deposited the rest into my account.

I've got two smaller jugs left with copper; maybe 15-20lbs worth.

If life goes on as usual for me, copper should now triple in value.

I've been pulling them from my pocket change since the mid 80's. I figure everybody has a change jar where they save up for something. Mine's just a little bigger than most & more of a hassle to cash in giving me the incentive to hang on to them until I have the time to check for varieties.

Right now copper is $2.81 a pound Since cents are not pure copper you could expect to gat about 25% of spot or $0.70 for roughly 146 one cent pieces. So copper would have to increase to $5.86 per pound before the copper would be worth face value. And since the dealer/smelter would want to make a profit as well you can probably figure it would have to be $6 a pound before you would actually be paid face value.

Will copper ever get to $6 a pound? Probably some day. Any time soon? Probably not. How much purchasing power will you lose holding all those copper cents waiting for it to reach $6 a pound? Probably a lot, which means copper would have to go up a lot more to make up for that value loss. Which means holding even longer and more purchasing power lost. It doesn't seem feasible to me.

In fact I bet most people that have made money from separating out their copper cents have made it from selling them to other hoarders who haven't figured out yet that it isn't feasible. I know back when copper was at the $4 mark and rising there were a lot of people making money on ebay selling copper cents to those hoarders who weren't allowing for the fact that they wouldn't be paid spot copper price for them.

not especially. save them in a container, search them once the container is full, wrap 'em & spend 'em. hopefully you have enough to buy a couple silver eagles with.